I came across a quiet reference to a village with an avenue of yew trees sculpted into shapes like foliage chess pieces, once part of a stately home now "open to all but oddly adrift". As a self-taught home practitioner of vernacular topiary (meet Spriggy Stardust, my front garden chameleon) I'm always curious to see other peoples' conversations with foliage.
So I went looking for views, and while there are some great ones on the Clipsham Yews website, including some deliciously shaggy views from a period of neglect, this gives you a short sharp view of the curiously clipped trees.
There's a sense of the Alice in Wonderland about them, of the Edward Gorey - a wandering line that merrily defies expectation in a flamboyant, albeit somewhat gloomy, flourish of eccentricity. How, you wonder, why?
Enter a short documentary slot rescued from an old video tape recording from a BBC series called Castle in the Country, which celebrates, through the technicolor snow of re-recording artefacts, the weird world of the plummy, chummy, shabby, snobby world of British aristocracy.
The basic brief in place: cut them any shape you wish but no two must be the same as each other, each year, each cut compounded by other ideas; characters from the village, but absolutely no women; the signature initials of gardeners and royalty; some animals; a building or two. At one time, tiny benches nestled in cutaway niches in the trees, cool in the yew shadow, but the recent fly-bys don't show these. They're a popular subject for drone flight videos - here's one from this year, parched by drought, but there are lots online.
I like to describe topiary as a conversation with the plant. I doubt I'm the first, but this is based on the first hand experience; of going in with plans of a smooth abstract shape, like a wave made of foliage.... and coming out with a huge comedic chameleon with a curly tail, the tail in particular feeling like it had already been in the hedge, just waiting to be picked out by my shears.
But the other thing you are conversing with, always, is the cuts of the years before. This year, for the first time, as I celebrated the end of sparrow breeding season (they like to set up in his head) by chopping in Spriggy's lines, I felt the weight and spread of the years before; the head bulging, the back drifting up out of reach in a slow upwards wave of green, eyes and legs heading off sideways in their urge to be just, you know, branches.
I'm on privet, which is a much less dense hedge-type than yew. I wouldn't be able to do relief work like this on my hedge, and it's machine cut - I use hand shears. But he's certainly starting to look a bit poddy, although still, recognisably, a chameleon.
So I went looking for views, and while there are some great ones on the Clipsham Yews website, including some deliciously shaggy views from a period of neglect, this gives you a short sharp view of the curiously clipped trees.
There's a sense of the Alice in Wonderland about them, of the Edward Gorey - a wandering line that merrily defies expectation in a flamboyant, albeit somewhat gloomy, flourish of eccentricity. How, you wonder, why?
Enter a short documentary slot rescued from an old video tape recording from a BBC series called Castle in the Country, which celebrates, through the technicolor snow of re-recording artefacts, the weird world of the plummy, chummy, shabby, snobby world of British aristocracy.
The basic brief in place: cut them any shape you wish but no two must be the same as each other, each year, each cut compounded by other ideas; characters from the village, but absolutely no women; the signature initials of gardeners and royalty; some animals; a building or two. At one time, tiny benches nestled in cutaway niches in the trees, cool in the yew shadow, but the recent fly-bys don't show these. They're a popular subject for drone flight videos - here's one from this year, parched by drought, but there are lots online.
But the other thing you are conversing with, always, is the cuts of the years before. This year, for the first time, as I celebrated the end of sparrow breeding season (they like to set up in his head) by chopping in Spriggy's lines, I felt the weight and spread of the years before; the head bulging, the back drifting up out of reach in a slow upwards wave of green, eyes and legs heading off sideways in their urge to be just, you know, branches.
I'm on privet, which is a much less dense hedge-type than yew. I wouldn't be able to do relief work like this on my hedge, and it's machine cut - I use hand shears. But he's certainly starting to look a bit poddy, although still, recognisably, a chameleon.
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